


flowers

by charcoalsuns



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 18:10:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11236422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/pseuds/charcoalsuns
Summary: In which Kenji sticks his head out a window, and back into an apartment, and onto a shoulder.





	flowers

 

 

It's not even the _nice_ kind of rain, Kenji grumbles, even as he plants his palms against the windowsill and leans outside.

It's coming down on the fire escape like an infinite truckload of nails, looking just like the harsh, minimal lines someone might use to sketch in a page of sky. But there's absolutely none of the cool, refreshing breeze that should be washing over his face right now; absolutely nothing to lift the disgusting humidity that's smothered the entire city all week.

His head is stuffed with stuffing, and it might be standard fare for the morning, but he's pretty sure he didn't sleep face down in his pillow – it really shouldn't feel quite so much like he'd spent an entire night breathing cotton in through his nose.

He's also pretty sure that isn't how respiration works, but as the rain is nothing more than wet on his face and as he can already feel the fabric of his T-shirt wilting against his shoulders, he for once cannot summon the foot-mouth, knee-jerk reaction to check his facts.

"Don't go falling out," comes his second favorite voice, and ah, _something_ washes over Kenji, all right.

His smile pops up like a spring daisy, whatever that means in July, so when he retracts the upper half of his body from the window it's with a cheer that should by all accounts overwhelm the part of him that was just a little startled, there.

Of course, though, this is Chikara he's smiling so winningly at, and no sort of overwhelming would seem ever to affect him.

_His_ smile is like grass, gentle and omnipresent and hiding blades in plain sight, especially in July, when the peaceful comfort of the spot on the floor right in front of their only fan fails to follow him wherever the rest of his day would lead.

"You smile like grass," says Kenji, foot-mouth reaction as slow today as Chikara is to impress any day, which is, admittedly, getting slower still, every five or fifteen or six thousand or so times Kenji opens his mouth.

This must be one of those times, then, because Chikara doesn't even stoop to gather the teaspoon of energy it would take for him to raise an eyebrow; merely turns back around without so much as a sigh, leaving the _I'm not even going to say anything_ to remain unsaid.

His footsteps are silent, in the comparative way, and Kenji only just remembers to shut the window on the rattling, torrential sauna outside before he goes after him.

Not far, and not only because there isn't that far to go, from one end of the room to the center. Chikara's shoulder is warm and still, fabric soft where Kenji rests his chin to watch steam rise from the mug of tea on the table. His cheek is dry against Kenji's rain-dashed nose.

"Wait, hang on," he says soon after, sitting up and craning his head to glare his realization. "Where's mine?"

"Your what," Chikara says, reading the words off the tablet in his hand.

Kenji presses his lips together, considers. He returns his head to the side of Chikara's, taking care to knock their temples together as he settles back in. "Nothing," he says, and reaches over for the tea. His now.

He knows well how to angle a cup just right, how to suck in more air than liquid and make the kind of sound that can't go ignored; he knows how to do this without spilling a drop, because the noise is right next to Chikara's ear, so the mugful of steaming tea is right above his folded legs.

When Kenji was sixteen, he'd once (or twice, maybe more) spent an entire afternoon trying to get Onagawa to swear within earshot of Moniwa, who, given Kamasaki, could hardly have minded – but Moniwa had seemed to be under the impression that it was mainly Kenji and Aone who were notable _problem kouhai_ , and as such, Kenji had been under the impression that it was his duty to relieve Moniwa of his misconception and flipped favoritism.

With all due respect, Onagawa's rudeness flew much lower on the radar, so it was understandably lost beneath Kenji's blatant, boundless needling. With no such respect, over a period of hours (or days) Kenji had still not managed to expose a single disruptive reaction from Onagawa, no matter how many bits of paper he hid in his towel to stick to his hair, no matter how many times he called him _Pantalons_. They'd ended up keeping the name anyway, in the end. And Moniwa still hadn't so much as witnessed Onagawa's quiet smirk when he would observe something unsavory.

A similar mild annoyance flicks up in Kenji now, whirring in the silence as his tea-drinking begins to feel less obnoxious and needles more towards distasteful. Things like this have their way of falling flat without a proper audience, engaged or enraged or otherwise, and although it's not that Kenji hasn't learned to adapt to Chikara's particular brand of selective inattention, it is a fact that he thrives in the flaring, bickering light of the opposite.

As it is a truth of both, Kenji lowers the mug back onto the table.

_Not now, then_.

He shifts his legs to prop up like armrests on either side of Chikara; rests his own elbows on his knees, and wilts like a T-shirt under a storm against Chikara's back, letting a sigh ruffle the air before them both. He closes his eyes, content to doze here for another while, wondering when it was, exactly, that he learned to let some things go unsaid, too.

After a few motionless minutes, Chikara stirs from his near-imperceptible breathing, and Kenji leans further into him, led forward by the particular bliss of a hand in his hair.

Chikara leans right back; he keeps them both upright like it's second nature, and by now, Kenji thinks, his arms wrapping themselves around Chikara's middle, it must be.

The sentiment has no more than occurred to him when Chikara gives one last pat to the head on his shoulder and goes back to whatever he was doing before, watching or planning or weaving through the security measures of. But a wisp of steam nudges Kenji's forehead, warm as a kiss, and when he opens his eyes, it's to lift them to the sight of Chikara's hand curled around his tea, instead.

_His_ tea, because apparently a prior claim stands for nothing these days.

Kenji huffs, hides a smile in the blind spot below Chikara's jawline, and doesn't mention it, turning on his other cheek to look out the window.

It's a morning as dark as evening, the sky casting its fleece over the apartments across the street. Thunder scatters like an avalanche among the clouds, like Kenji's shoes, tossed out of the way inside their front door, like Chikara's stomach, every four hours it goes without use.

Impossibly, the rain is falling even harder now.

It's not even the nice kind of rain, but Kenji, watching droplets run into rivers against the window, lifting his hand to an unruffled beat beneath a warm, familiar chest, thinks he can understand how it feels.

 

 


End file.
